I’ve been considering writing a reflective piece about the general quality of bioethics papers in medical journals, focusing on how the medium (the audience and the severe word limits) impacts on the message and its quality – possibly as a bit of a moan since I’ve not yet managed to get a medical journal to […]
Latest articles
Biases in Clinical Ethics Consultation
Guest post by Morten Magelssen, Reidar Pedersen, and Reidun Førde Read the full paper here. A difficult case involving a patient in an intensive care unit is brought to a clinical ethics consultant. The ethics consultant argues that intensive care is futile and should be withdrawn. The clinicians are grateful for the advice, and, with […]
Under-Treatment, Treated.
Right: file this paper from the JAMA under “Properly Odd”. It’s a proposal that nonadherence to a treatment regime be classed as a treatable medical condition in its own right. No, really. Look at the title: “Medication Nonadherence: A Diagnosable and Treatable Medical Condition”. Starting from the fairly straightforward premise that non-adherence to treatment regimes is “a […]
How Magic can help Teach Students about Medical Ethics
Guest post by Daniel Sokol, KCL For some time, I have been interested in the relationship between magic and medical ethics. Five years ago, I gave a talk in Prague on how to use magic in medical ethics education. More recently, I held a workshop on Magic for Anaesthetists, which touched on ethical issues in […]
Consent and Treatment Cascades: The case of giving birth
Apologies for my long absence – moving to Australia turned out to take up quite a bit of time, and make it hard for me to access and write on the blog… Still now I am here and in far more practical role than my previous appointment (I’m now in a medical school rather than […]
Research Ethics and Ethical Problems
Noted on Ben Goldacre’s twitter feed a couple of weeks ago was this article in Slate about the recruitment of pregnant women into drug trials. Essentially, there’s a situation in which there’s a dearth of information about the impact of drugs during pregnancy. According to the article, [p]harmaceutical companies are not willing to navigate the […]
Safety First? How the Current Drug Approval System Lets Some Patients Down
Post by Julian Savulescu Cross-posted from the Practical Ethics blog, and relating to this paper in the JME. Andrew Culliford, whose story is featured in the Daily Mail, is one of the estimated 7 in 100,000 people living with Motor Neuron disease, a progressive degenerative disease which attacks muscles, leaving those affected eventually unable even to […]
Drug Legalisation in Uruguay: Opening up Pandora’s Box
Guest post by Melissa Bone, University of Manchester Uruguay is poised to become the first country in the world to legalise and regulate the sale of cannabis for recreational use. On the 31st July 2013 a draft bill legalising cannabis was passed by members of Uruguay’s lower house of congress, where 50 out of a […]
Emmerich on Fitness to Practise
Having asked out loud whether anyone could explain a couple of odd FtP decisions, I got this from Nathan Emmerich, offering sociological pop at an answer… Iain wondered if anyone could explain the morality that underlies a couple of recent Fitness to Practise decisions made by the GMC. Well, more accurately he wondered if anyone […]
Fitness to Practise Revisited
***UPDATE: Important codicil at the end*** Back in March, I posted something about what I took to be a slightly odd Fitness to Practise decision by the GMC in respect of one Mohammed Al-Byati. Via the BMJ, here’s another case that seems a bit strange: A doctor who abducted her six year old daughter from […]